The welcome page of GCHQ

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. Primarily based at The Doughnut in the suburbs of Cheltenham, GCHQ is the responsibility of the country's Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Foreign Secretary), but it is not a part of the Foreign Office and its director ranks as a Permanent Secretary.

GCHQ was originally established after the First World War as the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and was known under that name until 1946. During the Second World War it was located at Bletchley Park, where it was responsible for breaking the German Enigma codes. There are two main components of GCHQ, the Composite Signals Organisation (CSO), which is responsible for gathering information, and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is responsible for securing the UK's own communications. The Joint Technical Language Service (JTLS) is a small department and cross-government resource responsible for mainly technical language support and translation and interpreting services across government departments. It is co-located with GCHQ for administrative purposes.

In 2013, GCHQ received considerable media attention when the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was in the process of collecting all online and telephone data in the UK via the Tempora programme. Snowden's revelations began a spate of ongoing disclosures of global surveillance. The Guardian newspaper was forced to destroy computer hard drives with the files Snowden had given them because of the threats of a lawsuit under the Official Secrets Act. In June 2014, The Register reported that the information the government sought to suppress by destroying the hard drives related to the location of a "beyond top secret" GCHQ internet monitoring base in Seeb, Oman, and the close involvement of BT and Cable & Wireless in intercepting internet communications.

SECURITY MISSION

As well as a mission to gather intelligence, GCHQ has for a long time had a corresponding mission to assist in the protection of the British government's own communications. When the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was created in 1919, its overt task was providing security advice. GC&CS's Security section was located in Mansfield College, Oxford during the Second World War.

LEGALITY

GCHQ's legal basis is established by the Intelligence Services Act 1994 Section 3 as follows:

(1) There shall continue to be a Government Communications Headquarters under the authority of the Secretary of State; and, subject to subsection (2) below, its functions shall be —
(a) to monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions and to obtain and provide information derived from or related to such emissions or equipment and from encrypted material; and
(b) to provide advice and assistance about —
(i) languages, including terminology used for technical matters, and
(ii) cryptography and other matters relating to the protection of information and other material, to the armed forces of the Crown, to Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom or to a Northern Ireland Department or to any other organisation which is determined for the purposes of this section in such manner as may be specified by the Prime Minister.

(2) The functions referred to in subsection (1)(a) above shall be exercisable only —
(a) in the interests of national security, with particular reference to the defence and foreign policies of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom; or
(b) in the interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands; or
(c) in support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.

(3) In this Act, the expression "GCHQ" refers to the Government Communications Headquarters and to any unit or part of a unit of the armed forces of the Crown which is for the time being required by the Secretary of State to assist the Government Communications Headquarters in carrying out its functions.

Activities that involve interception of communications are permitted under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000; this kind of interception can only be carried out after a warrant has been issued by a Secretary of State. The Human Rights Act 1998 requires the intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, to respect citizens' rights as described in the European Convention on Human Rights.

OVERSIGHT

The Prime Minister nominates cross-party Members of Parliament to an Intelligence and Security Committee. The remit of the Committee includes oversight of intelligence and security activities and reports are made directly to Parliament. Its functions were increased under the Justice and Security Act 2013 to provide for further access and investigatory powers.

Judicial oversight of GCHQ's conduct is exercised by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The UK also has an independent Intelligence Services Commissioner and Interception of Communications Commissioner, both of whom are former senior judges.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled in December 2014 that GCHQ does not breach the European Convention on Human Rights, and that its activities are compliant with Articles 8 (right to privacy) and 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights. However, the Tribunal stated in February 2015 that one particular aspect, the data-sharing arrangement that allowed UK Intelligence services to request data from the US surveillance programmes Prism and Upstream, had been in contravention of human rights law prior to this until two paragraphs of additional information, providing details about the procedures and safeguards, were disclosed to the public in December 2014.

Furthermore, the IPT ruled that the legislative framework in the United Kingdom does not permit mass surveillance and that while GCHQ collects and analyses data in bulk, it does not practice mass surveillance. This complements independent reports by the Interception of Communications Commissioner, and a special report made by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament; although several shortcomings and potential improvements to both oversight and the legislative framework were highlighted.

ABUSES

Despite the inherent secrecy around much of GCHQ's work, investigations carried out by the UK government after the Snowden disclosures have admitted various abuses by the security services. A report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in 2015 revealed that a small number of staff at UK intelligence agencies had been found to misuse their surveillance powers, in one case leading to the dismissal of a member of staff at GCHQ, although there were no laws in place at the time to make these abuses a criminal offence.

Later that year, a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal found that GCHQ acted unlawfully in conducting surveillance on two human rights organisations. The closed hearing found the government in breach of its internal surveillance policies in accessing and retaining the communications of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa. This was only the second time in the IPT's history that it had made a positive determination in favour of applicants after a closed session.

At another IPT case in 2015, GCHQ conceded that "from January 2010, the regime for the interception/obtaining, analysis, use, disclosure and destruction of legally privileged material has not been in accordance with the law for the purposes of Article 8(2) of the European convention on human rights and was accordingly unlawful". This admission was made in connection with a case brought against them by Abdelhakim Belhaj, a Libyan opponent of the Gaddafi regime, and his wife Fatima Bouchard. The couple had accused the British government of participating in the regime's abduction of them to Libya in March 2004.

On 25 May 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that the GCHQ is guilty of violating data privacy rules through their bulk interception of communications, and does not provide sufficient protections for confidential journalistic material because it gathers communications in bulk.

PARLIAMENTARIANS

In 2015 there was a complaint by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas that British intelligence services, including GCHQ, had been spying on MPs allegedly "in defiance of laws prohibiting it."

Then-Home Secretary, Theresa May, had told Parliament in 2014 that:

Obviously, the Wilson Doctrine applies to parliamentarians. It does not absolutely exclude the use of these powers against parliamentarians, but it sets certain requirements for those powers to be used in relation to a parliamentarian. It is not the case that parliamentarians are excluded and nobody else in the country is, but there is a certain set of rules and protocols that have to be met if there is a requirement to use any of these powers against a parliamentarian.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal investigated the complaint, and ruled that contrary to the allegation, there was no law that gave the communications of Parliament any special protection. The Wilson Doctrine merely acts as a political convention.

THE GCHQ CASE

A controversial GCHQ case determined the scope of judicial review of prerogative powers (the Crown's residual powers under common law). This was Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374 (often known simply as the "GCHQ case"). In this case, a prerogative Order in Council had been used by the prime minister (who is the Minister for the Civil Service) to ban trade union activities by civil servants working at GCHQ. This order was issued without consultation. The House of Lords had to decide whether this was reviewable by judicial review. It was held that executive action is not immune from judicial review simply because it uses powers derived from common law rather than statute (thus the prerogative is reviewable).

GCHQ DIRECTORS

The following is a list of the heads and operational heads of GCHQ and GC&CS:

Sir Hugh Sinclair (1919–1939) (founder)
Cmdr Alastair Denniston (1921 to February 1942) (operational head)
Sir Edward Travis (February 1942–1952)
Sir Eric Jones (April 1952–1960)
Sir Clive Loehnis (1960–1964)
Sir Leonard Hooper (1965–1973)
Sir Arthur Bonsall (1973–1978)
Sir Brian John Maynard Tovey (1978–1983)
Sir Peter Marychurch (1983–1989)
Sir John Anthony Adye (1989–1996)
Sir David Omand (1996–1997)
Sir Kevin Tebbit (1998)
Sir Francis Richards (1998–2003)
Sir David Pepper (2003–2008)
Sir Iain Lobban (2008–2014)
Robert Hannigan (2014–2017)
Sir Jeremy Fleming (2017–2023)
Anne Keast-Butler (since 2023)

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

GCHQ operates in partnership with equivalent agencies worldwide in a number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral relationships. The principal of these is with the United States (National Security Agency), Canada (Communications Security Establishment), Australia (Australian Signals Directorate) and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), through the mechanism of the UK-US Security Agreement, a broad intelligence-sharing agreement encompassing a range of intelligence collection methods. Relationships are alleged to include shared collection methods, such as the system described in the popular media as ECHELON, as well as analysed product.

MI6 - SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

The SIS, is the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6. They are the UK's foreign intelligence service, gathering intelligence and working with partners internationally to protect the UK's interests, values and security overseas, and achieving economic, diplomatic and technological advantage for His Majesty's Government (HMG).

POPULAR CULTURE

In the historical drama film The Imitation Game (2014) Benedict Cumberbatch portrays Alan Turing in his efforts to break the Enigma code while employed by the Government Code and Cypher School.

GCHQ have set a number of cryptic online challenges to the public, used to attract interest and for recruitment, starting in late 1999. The response to the 2004 challenge was described as "excellent", and the challenge set in 2015 had over 600,000 attempts. It also published the GCHQ Puzzle Book in 2016 which sold more than 300,000 copies, with the proceeds going to charity. A second book was published in October 2018.

GCHQ appeared in the Doctor Who 2019 special "Resolution" where the Reconnaissance Scout Dalek storms the facility and exterminates the staff in order to use the organisation's resources to summon a Dalek fleet.

GCHQ is the setting of the 2020 Sky One sitcom Intelligence, featuring David Schwimmer as an incompetent American NSA officer liaising with GCHQ's Cyber Crimes unit.

In October 2020, intelligence and security expert John Ferris published Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency.

GCHQ is the setting of the 2022 Channel 4 drama The Undeclared War. Set in the near future, it depicts a work experience student at the government agency during a cyberattack on the UK and the implications.

Corruption lurks in every corridor of local and national buildings.

MEDIA OFFICE

Journalists with enquiries about GCHQ can contact the media team during office hours by emailing pressoffice@gchq.gov.uk or calling 01242 221491 (ext 33847).

For urgent out-of-hours enquiries please contact the media team via pressoffice@gchq.gov.uk and the duty media officer will get back to you.

Journalists with enquiries about the National Cyber Force – a joint GCHQ and Ministry of Defence partnership – can also contact us through this route.

If you are a journalist trying to contact the National Cyber Security Centre – a part of GCHQ – visit the NCSC website for contact details for its media team.

FILM OFFICE

If you're from a production company and wish to speak to us about an unscripted documentary or TV show, or a scripted drama or film, please email filmoffice@gchq.gov.uk.

REFERENCE

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/
https://www.sis.gov.uk/

https://www.gchq.gov.uk/

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/
https://www.sis.gov.uk/